Local vs. Regional

After Dr. Ferrier came to talk to us this week she made me really start to think about where the food we eat comes from. I looked in my family’s refrigerator and noticed an interesting trend. The majority of our food was produced in places other than North Carolina. In fact, most of our food came from places that seemed impractical. We had apples from Whole Foods that were grown in Washington, carrots from Whole Foods grown in Texas and milk from Target that was produced in Minnesota. We also had salad dressing that was supposedly from Biltmore House, which is in Asheville. I assumed that this meant that it would be produced in that general area, but actually it is produced in West Virginia. The only products in our refrigerator that were from North Carolina were butter and heavy cream from Harris Teeter, which were produced in Matthews, NC near Charlotte. Even though these were produced the closest to our home, they still came from outside of the 100-mile “local food radius” that we talked about in class. I was really perturbed by this, because I had never realized how illogical it is to eat foods that are not local. I decided that I wanted to find out more about this phenomenon, so I went to our local Whole Foods.

A new Whole Foods just opened near my house. Whole Foods presents itself as an alternative to big, national grocery store chains and lulls customers into believing that by shopping there they are being more responsible consumers. I always felt like I was doing the right thing by shopping at Whole Foods, and I was really surprised when I looked in my refrigerator and realized that the organic produce I felt so good about buying was coming from places that are so far away. The apples I bought came from the other side of the country. It does not make any sense for apples being sold in North Carolina to be grown in Washington when there are apples that grow in our state. When I went into Whole Foods I noticed that a lot of the fresh produce they were selling had signs advertising it as “local”. I decided to see just how true this was.

Looking through the different fruits and vegetables I noticed items from across the United States (California, Florida, Idhao and Washington were all popular places) as well as various countries (Chile, Mexico, Bolivia and Argentina). Obviously, these items are far from local, but they also are not being promoted as such. I decided to shift my attention to local and regional products.

I asked an employee how these labels were defined, and he told me that “local” products come from “the entire state of North Carolina and a small slice of Virginia” while “regional” items can come from “South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and a small bit of Florida, anywhere within a seven hour drive”. While this is more local and regional than California or Washington they are still shipping these products a long distance, adding to consumers’ overall footprint. I looked at the “local” products and found items that came from places twenty to one hundred miles away. I think that if Whole Foods wants to market these products as local they need to reconfigure just what that means for them and rein in these distances. The entire state of North Carolina is not “local”. In my opinion, that would be “regional”, but I think that this further proves that these terms are very subjective and do not have a particularly solid definition. Overall, my trip to Whole Foods proved to me that these terms are very loosely defined and that it is important to look closely at just exactly what they mean.

This week I took my dog for a walk in a local park because the weather was so nice. I enjoyed getting out in the nice weather and having an entire weekend that finally felt like spring!